I suck at mopey. I always have. Oh, I can kick out a mean moping, wallow in the mire of misery, I just suck at putting it into words. John Steinbeck did good mopey stuff. It was honest. People suffering life, and while they were sad stories, they were full of life too. Poe can mope in style - read Annabelle Lee. I write bad mope. The whiny sort of crap that makes you scream "Oh, fergodssakes, JUMP already!"
What brings this up?, you might ask.
I'm watching a movie - Hope Floats. Here's a woman who is hurting, and the story is real. I mean, its believably written. When I write it, it feels contrived and embarrassing. I think writing sorrow is too much like letting down defenses. It's uncomfortable and when I read what I wrote, it sounds stilted. It makes me cringe. Obviously I need to practice.
I titled this piece after a song - Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues. Everybody gets the blues sometimes. (That's another song. Lets see how many I can reference in one paragraph and stay on topic.) We all have times when no matter how bright the sun is outside, it's raining inside (Sunrise - Uriah Heep). Since these are universal emotions, you'd think they'd be easier to put down on paper. Sometimes the words are too personal, at least for me. And if I think too much while I am writing it, it stinks. But if I don't think, if I just let the words flow, its too personal and I can't bear to let it go public. The weird thing about that is that it doesn't have to be something I've actually experienced and it can still end up feeling way too personal.
Anywho, Hope Floats. This is a good movie. There's a lot of life in it. It starts out with our heroine learning - on live television- that her husband and best friend are having an affair. That made me think of all the crappy shows we have like that. Why do people watch? Why do people want to see someone's life ripped to pieces like that? And why do people go on those shows? I totally do not get this. Why trick someone into that kind of humiliation? Just as bad are the people who go on thinking they are going to humiliate someone else and not recognizing how badly they come off, themselves. I also don't get why anyone would do televised court TV.
This goes back to the "too public" thing I was talking about earlier. I think its mostly good that we don't cave in to 'shame', but I also think its maybe a little bad that we don't seem to have any shame either. I remember thinking, back in the '90's, that it was rather nice that chubby females were not ashamed of being chubby. In the '70's thin was definitely 'in' and chubby girls did everything they could to hide their weight. In the early '90's that changed, which is mostly good. You shouldn't be ashamed of your body and it ought to be okay to not be perfect.
You shouldn't be ashamed that once upon a time you made some mistake that probably felt like the end of the world at the time. Doing stupid stuff is part of growing. Everyone makes mistakes but doing the same stupid stuff repeatedly is just stupid. Don't be ashamed of the things you actually learned some lesson from. By the same token, you shouldn't really wear your past idiocies as some sort of Badge of Glory either.
Somehow we've gone to the other extreme. A hundred years ago, you could never live down some mistakes. Now we act like they are something to be proud of. No middle ground. Same with weight - we went from semi-starved to fat, and every body is still half dressed. We have guts hanging out and butt cracks escaping. I still believe we should not be ashamed of our bodies, but I wish we took a little better care of them!
I think they put the televised humiliation scene into the movie hoping to make a point. It repeats later, a different scene, but we get to see the reaction of the heroine to someone else's suffering. Maybe it made a few people realize how ugly those shows are. It was another scene that made me aware of how awkward my written emotional scenes are compared to how well done this scene was.
I make connections. So this scenario also brought to mind the other TV shows - the ones that supposedly are meant to educate the public - like "Hoarders". Supposedly they are trying to get people to understand that this lifestyle isn't a choice, it's an illness. The shows aren't popular because viewers want to see people get help. Humans are judgmental and these shows feed that.
People often say that children are cruel. I think humans have a stunning capacity for cruelty. That makes writing emotional scenes even harder. You're trying to convey the misery without eliciting the ridicule factor. 'Hope Floats' used visuals to keep the sympathy with the heroine. The 'best friend' was less attractive, poorly groomed, slightly sleazy looking. The heroine was pretty, dignified and reacted with quiet grace. The husband was a jerk.
The acting is what made the scene, not the writing. Movie scripts are sparse, unlike books. A book might describe the look on her face, the tremble in her shoulders. A book might state that she held back her tears, and might give insight into her thoughts. Movie scripts do not. The dialog is interpreted by the director and actors, so what the writer envisioned and what gets acted out may not match. This is why movies are rarely what the book reader expected.
I watched this scene and wondered if I could write it as a book scene. This is when I admitted to myself that I suck at writing this sort of scene and started figuring out why I find these scenes so challenging. Shame and judgment are inherently connected. I think people try so hard to suppress feeling shame that it makes them even more judgmental, as a sort of defense mechanism. I get very attached to my characters. I become protective. I don't want to open them up to ridicule, I try to shield them. As a result, my scenes are stilted. I have the same problem in reverse if I dislike a character; I write them as too nasty. In reality, mean people are sometimes nice and nice people are occasionally real jerks.
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